Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

inder of the outside… clutching finely wrought silver, which glittered even
in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head to toe numbness, I was sav
ed, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir.
No there was more to it than spittoons: for, as we all know by now, our her
o is greatly affected by being shut up in confined spaces. Transformations
spring upon him in the enclosed dark. As a mere embryo in the secrecy of a
womb (not his mother's), did he not grow into the incarnation of the new my
th of August 15th, the child of ticktock did he not emerge as the Mubarak,
the Blessed Child? In a cramped wash room, were name tags not switched arou
nd? Alone in a washing chest with a drawstring up one nostril, did he not g
limpse a Black Mango and sniff too hard, turning himself and his upper cucu
mber into a kind of supernatural ham radio? Hemmed in by doctors, nurses an
d anaesthetic masks, did he not succumb to numbers and, having suffered dra
inage above, move into a second phase, that of nasal philosopher and (later
) tracker supreme? Squashed, in a small abandoned hut, beneath the body of
Ayooba Baloch, did he not learn the meaning of fair and unfair? Well, then
trapped in the occult peril of the basket of invisibility, I was saved, not
only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by another transformation: in t
he grip of that awful disembodied loneliness, whose smell was the smell of
graveyards, I discovered anger.
Something was fading in Saleem and something was being born. Fading: an ol
d pride in baby snaps and framed Nehru letter; an old determination to esp
ouse, willingly, a prophesied historical role; and also a willingness to m
ake allowances, to understand how parents and strangers might legitimately
despise or exile him for his ugliness; mutilated fingers and monks' tonsu
res no longer seemed like good enough excuses for the way in which he, I,
had been treated. The object of my wrath was, in fact, everything which I
had, until then, blindly accepted: my parents' desire that I should repay
their investment in me by becoming great; genius Iike a shawl; the modes o
f connection themselves inspired in me a blind, lunging fury. Why me? Why,
owing to accidents of birth prophecy etcetera, must I be responsible for
language riots and after Nehru who, for pepperpot revolutions and bombs wh
ich annihilated my family? Why should I, Saleem Snotnose, Sniffer, Mapface
, Piece of the Moon, accept the blame for what was not done by Pakistani t
roops in Dacca?… Why, alone of all the more than five hundred million, sho
uld I have to bear the burden of history?
What my discovery of unfairness (smelling of onions) had begun, my invisibl
e rage completed. Wrath enabled me to survive the soft siren temptations of
invisibility; anger made me determined, after I was released from vanishme
nt in the shadow of a Friday Mosque, to 'begin, from that moment forth, to
choose my own, undestined future. And there, in the silence of graveyard re
eking isolation, I heard the long ago voice of the virginal Mary Pereira, s